A cross-platform mobile app provides real-time pricing of precious metals, allowing suppliers to search and submit a load easily from their device. The app extends sales reach and heightens transactions.
About
FJ Church & Sons is an international scrap trading company who specialise in Non-Ferrous, Catalytic Converters and Weee materials.
The Challenge
FJ Church approached Objective with the ambition to mobilise their Converter Buyer Catalogue, despite having reservations on data security and usability of Mobile Apps.
The Converter Buyer Catalogue has 12,000+ catalytic converters showing images, types, manufacturers and long digit codes and pricing which is dictated by the Precious Metals Index.
With competitors already taking the leap to having mobile apps in the stores they believed now was the opportune time to make the leap themselves. They also wanted to keep the User Interface simple and easy to use so any age of the workforce could use the app intuitively.
The Solution
Objective developed a multi-platform mobile application with a custom Web API to interact with the current Portal to deliver the up to date pricing, imagery and information for each catalytic converter.
This was achieved using Xamarin so that all the code was cross platform, making it reusable rather than creating and maintaining two separate applications.
The app is split into 3 separate sections which ultimately work together:
- The Search
which allows quick and simple searching of the entire catalogue which is ever growing with some 12,000+ converters
- The Basket
with two ways to add to the basket both from the search screen directly or when inside the converters details. The basket was created to track the Suppliers current selections and prices allowing them control to add and remove before submitting them to the system
- Viewing Loads
once the supplier has finished their basket and submitted it to FJ Church it is approved and Load sheets are created the app shows an overview of Load with which catalysts are part of it how many there are and the prices they were bought at.
The Results & Benefits
- Improved access and searchability with the Converter Buyer Catalogue
- Saves Suppliers time and can reach a wider mobile workforce in the field
- Can easily create a new basket and submit to the portal
- Ability to check/view previous loads
- All data is kept in-house with no third party access
The Technology
Xamarin
C#
SQL
Custom Web API